10 Women Who Secretly Control the Internet

Power Grid

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Allow Us To Explain... Yes, Virginia, there are women on the Internet. Maybe the percentage of women working in tech-related fields is still low, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't already major female power players in charge of some of the most successful tech companies. Their achievements range from revolutionizing Wikipedia, hacking into everything, and -- seriously -- controlling the Internet. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most powerful women in technology that you might not have considered.

Suzanne Woolf (Root Server System Advisory Committee) Imagine all the technical operations surrounding how the Internet is controlled, policed, implemented, and organized. Now imagine one woman who knows how all of that works and probably has the power to shut it all down. That woman is Suzanne Woolf. She has served as the Root Server System Advisory Committee Liaison since 2004 and worked with the Internet Systems Consortium since 2002. According to the ICANN Address Supporting Organization, she has been responsible for “shepherding ISC’s involvement in finalizing DNSSEC specifications through the IETF and fielding the first DNSSEC-compliant versions of BIND. Current projects include open source implementation of IPv4-IPv6 transition technology and ISC’s efforts to support wide-scale deployment of DNSSEC.” And if you don’t know what that means, it means that you’re not supposed to. These, friends, are the inner workings of the Internet. And Suzanne Woolf has her finger on the trigger.

Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook) While Mark Zuckerberg locks himself in his office, coding minor site features for Facebook that tend to do nothing but make 400 million people around the world angry, Sheryl Sandberg runs day-to-day operations and maintains a positive public image for the most popular site in the world. Sandberg was stolen away from Google after meeting Zuckerberg at a Christmas party. Before that, she did some things to help save the world, namely working with the World Bank on leprosy, AIDS, and blindness as well as helping the U.S. Treasury forgive debt in developing countries. So, anyone else feeling unaccomplished?

Carol Bartz (President, CEO, Yahoo!) Here’s one thing not to tell a woman who will become one of the most powerful women in the world: “Women don’t do these jobs.” That’s what Carol Bartz was told when she requested to work for 3M headquarters. Immediately afterward, she joined the computer industry, which she pretty much controls now as the President and CEO of Yahoo!. She makes a lot of lists such as this one, but how do you ignore a woman like Carol Bartz? Since taking over, Bartz initiated deep cuts and layoffs to keep the then-struggling company afloat. Also notorious for her secrecy, she threatened to “drop-kick [employees who leaked information] to f**king Mars.” Word to the wise: Don’t tell Carol Bartz what to do.

Cindy Cohn (Legal Director, General Counsel, Electronic Frontier Foundation) The cases taken on by Cindy Cohn are precedent-setting cases that are forming the digital media landscape. She has defended online activism, individuals against warrantless wiretapping under NSA spying, and the loosening of restrictions on encryption software (which later became caselaw). In addition to hot-button issues involving the government, Cohn also argued in the case of Google Book Search, in which she defended high-profile authors and publishers and the privacy violations involved in broad agreements on digital book dissemination. She first joined EFF in 1995 and has been “rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online” ever since.

Limor Fried (Adafruit) Limor Fried is a rare breed -- a successful, maybe even prolific, female electrical engineer. Her biography on her site, LadyAda (Fried’s hacker handle after Ada Lovelace, the first programmer), modestly proclaims that she “creates things, some of which are beautiful and interesting.” What she is capable of, however, is what puts her on this list: her ability to hack into consumer electronics. Among her most successful projects are the “Minty Boost,” which is a battery pack for the iPhone that fits in an Altoids tin (hence the name), and a cell phone jammer, which she invented to block phone signals around her that were causing interference, but ultimately turned out to be illegal. But her greatest achievement was motivating the crack of the Kinect by offering, through her company Adafruit, a cash prize for the first person to create an open-source driver for Microsoft’s powerful gaming peripheral. Rather than sue (which they originally threatened to do), Microsoft instead embraced Kinect hacking, opening up its policy. Now, that’s power.

Heather Harde (CEO, TechCrunch) Heather Harde is no stranger to technology and media. While she has held a variety of positions including at TV Guide and Viacom and eventually News Corporation and Fox Interactive Media, a common theme throughout her career has been the relationship between technology and media. Now the CEO of TechCrunch, she is responsible for running daily operations and has been instrumental to the company’s growth and success, according to founder Michael Arrington. And after spending a decade at a huge media conglomerate, she was fully equipped to take a burgeoning tech blog and turn that into an empire, too. Recently, she was quoted: "Arianna Huffington, as the founder of a business with a $315 million exit, is very inspiring to me."

Gerri Martin-Flickinger (CIO, Adobe) As the CIO of Adobe, Gerri Martin-Flickinger likes to know everything her company is working on rather than work above the clouds, blissfully ignorant of day-to-day operations. Martin-Flickinger places a high priority on knowing not just what her employees are doing throughout her huge, global organization. Not only that, but she also takes a hands-on approach to what is being produced at Adobe and how it’s being implemented. So, whenever you open a pdf, take a second to thank Gerri Martin-Flickinger. Because she knows exactly how every single part of it works and could probably destroy it for all of us. She says, “You’re welcome.”*
*Not a direct quote

Natalie Massenet (Founder, Net-a-Porter) Before online shopping became popular with men and women alike, Natalie Massenet had the idea to sell Indian pashmina scarves and later designer jeans online back when “women would never shop online.” Now, since selling her company Net-a-Porter, she has made an estimated $76 million after boasting even bigger sales from 2008 to 2010. Before becoming a huge force in high-end Internet fashion, Massenet was working on movie sets and styling photo shoots. When people started asking her where they could buy her pieces, she thought to find ways to sell them. Despite the dot-com bubble bursting, she pushed ahead, even taking furniture from companies that went south for her own office. Did Natalie Massanet become a success because of her opportunism? Well, when opportunity knocks …

Joanne Bradford (CRO, Demand Media) Even as Google has declared war on “content farms,” Joanne Bradford stands by the company she rejuvenated and grew, and vowed last summer that Demand Media will be bigger than Yahoo! (her former employer) and AOL. And while the sites (like eHow and AnswerBag) that post cheap content (often provided by struggling journalists, being paid a grand dollar per article) are inescapable in a Google search, Bradford says that eventually ads placed on appropriate, PageRanked content will be impossible to pass up for top brands. She also defends the content, saying that it is the original work of thousands of real writers, being checked for quality and plagiarism by “1,000 copy editors.” So, don’t tell Bradford she’s running a content farm. All she’ll do is point you to all those pages she owns.

Florence Devouard (Advisory Board, Wikimedia Foundation) Jimmy Wales has gotten most of the credit for being the Web 2.0 visionary who created Wikipedia, but the site grew to its current size because of a brilliant set of editorial rules and guidelines which allowed for a decentralized network of hundred of thousands of people to work together. And Florence Devouard was the the full-time genetic engineer who put that structure together. In an interview, Devouard said that in 2002, she felt “cooped-up” in a small town of France when she wanted to discuss the pressing issues of the day, including the Iraq War and genetically modified food. That’s when she was first introduced to Wikipedia, then began writing articles before eventually gaining the influence in the organization that helped it become the information source it is today. She played a huge role in making Wikipedia international, which led to the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you’ve ever asked yourself why it’s now acceptable to use Wikipedia as a source of information, you can thank Knight of the French National Order of Merit, Florence Devouard.